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Large Language Models (LLMs) employ Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to deconstruct complex problems. While longer CoTs are often presumed superior, this paper challenges that notion, arguing that longer is not always better. Drawing on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Yuyang Wu , Yifei Wang , Ziyu Ye , Tianqi Du , Stefanie Jegelka , Yisen Wang

Large language models exhibit high-level commonsense reasoning abilities, especially with enhancement methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, we find these CoT-like methods lead to a considerable number of originally correct answers…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Jiachun Li , Pengfei Cao , Chenhao Wang , Zhuoran Jin , Yubo Chen , Daojian Zeng , Kang Liu , Jun Zhao

Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to an agent's ability to model the internal states of others. Contributing to the debate whether large language models (LLMs) exhibit genuine ToM capabilities, our study investigates their ToM robustness using…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Christian Nickel , Laura Schrewe , Florian Mai , Lucie Flek

Chain of Thought (CoT) is significant in improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the correlation between the effectiveness of CoT and the length of reasoning steps in prompts remains largely unknown. To…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Mingyu Jin , Qinkai Yu , Dong Shu , Haiyan Zhao , Wenyue Hua , Yanda Meng , Yongfeng Zhang , Mengnan Du

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is fundamental to modern LLM architectures and represents a critical intervention point for AI safety. However, CoT reasoning may exhibit failure modes that we note as pathologies, which prevent it from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Manqing Liu , David Williams-King , Ida Caspary , Linh Le , Hannes Whittingham , Puria Radmard , Cameron Tice , Edward James Young

Recent work has demonstrated that Chain-of-Thought (CoT) often yields limited gains for soft-reasoning problems such as analytical and commonsense reasoning. CoT can also be unfaithful to a model's actual reasoning. We investigate the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Samuel Lewis-Lim , Xingwei Tan , Zhixue Zhao , Nikolaos Aletras

Chain-of-thought and more broadly test-time compute are known to augment the expressive capabilities of language models and have led to major innovations in reasoning. Motivated by this success, this paper explores latent chain-of-thought…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Carson Dudley , Samet Oymak

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance in complex reasoning tasks through the use of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, allowing models to break down problems into manageable sub-tasks. However, existing CoT…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Jean-Francois Ton , Muhammad Faaiz Taufiq , Yang Liu

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) technique has proven effective in improving the performance of large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. However, the performance gains are inconsistent across different tasks, and the underlying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Peijie Liu , Fengli Xu , Yong Li

Chain-of-thought (CoT) offers a potential boon for AI safety as it allows monitoring a model's CoT to try to understand its intentions and reasoning processes. However, the effectiveness of such monitoring hinges on CoTs faithfully…

Chain-of-thought (CoT), tree-of-thought (ToT), and related techniques work surprisingly well in practice for some complex reasoning tasks with Large Language Models (LLMs), but why? This work seeks the underlying reasons by conducting…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Liwei Kang , Zirui Zhao , David Hsu , Wee Sun Lee

Chain-of-thought (CoT) via prompting is the de facto method for eliciting reasoning capabilities from large language models (LLMs). But for what kinds of tasks is this extra ``thinking'' really helpful? To analyze this, we conducted a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-09 Zayne Sprague , Fangcong Yin , Juan Diego Rodriguez , Dongwei Jiang , Manya Wadhwa , Prasann Singhal , Xinyu Zhao , Xi Ye , Kyle Mahowald , Greg Durrett

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) plays a crucial role in reasoning for math problem solving. We conduct a comprehensive examination of methods for designing CoT, comparing conventional natural language CoT with various program CoTs, including the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Zhanming Jie , Trung Quoc Luong , Xinbo Zhang , Xiaoran Jin , Hang Li

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning is known to improve Large Language Models both empirically and in terms of theoretical approximation power. However, our understanding of the inner workings and conditions of apparition of CoT capabilities…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Vivien Cabannes , Charles Arnal , Wassim Bouaziz , Alice Yang , Francois Charton , Julia Kempe

Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring has been proposed as a promising safety mechanism for detecting misaligned behavior in large language models. However, its reliability remains largely unexplored beyond English and across diverse model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Eric Onyame , Runtao Zhou , Kowshik Thopalli , Bhavya Kailkhura , Chirag Agarwal

Chain-of-Thought (CoT), a step-wise and coherent reasoning chain, shows its impressive strength when used as a prompting strategy for large language models (LLM). Recent years, the prominent effect of CoT prompting has attracted emerging…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Zihan Yu , Liang He , Zhen Wu , Xinyu Dai , Jiajun Chen

Large language models have shown remarkable reasoning abilities and scaling laws suggest that large parameter count, especially along the depth axis, is the primary driver. In this work, we make a stronger claim -- many reasoning problems…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Nikunj Saunshi , Nishanth Dikkala , Zhiyuan Li , Sanjiv Kumar , Sashank J. Reddi

A common approach for teaching large language models (LLMs) to reason is to train on chain-of-thought (CoT) traces of in-distribution reasoning problems, but such annotated data is costly to obtain for every problem of interest. We want…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Fangcong Yin , Zeyu Leo Liu , Liu Leqi , Xi Ye , Greg Durrett

This is the second in a series of short reports that seek to help business, education, and policy leaders understand the technical details of working with AI through rigorous testing. In this report, we investigate Chain-of-Thought (CoT)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Lennart Meincke , Ethan Mollick , Lilach Mollick , Dan Shapiro

Large Language Models (LLMs) can achieve strong performance on many tasks by producing step-by-step reasoning before giving a final output, often referred to as chain-of-thought reasoning (CoT). It is tempting to interpret these CoT…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Miles Turpin , Julian Michael , Ethan Perez , Samuel R. Bowman